1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data protection device and a method of securing data, and in particular to a device installation that supports all types of storage media interface with higher data access rate and more efficient usage of disk space.
2. The Related Art
Conventional data protection is based on the hardware implementation of a data protection circuit, which is installed between a conventional hard disk interface and the data bus. For the operating system, the specially adapted hard disk is treated as a conventional hard disk, with no need of any driver programs. Data can be written directly into a data storage device without any driver programs. Therefore, the data access rate of the hard disk is not affected, only that the disk operation has become more secure.
However, there is a limitation to using the prior art data protection technique, which can only be used on the storage media interface that is invariably set for two IDE hard disks or logical drives. After assigning the disk space for the primary data area and the virtual data area, the disk space remaining is allotted to logical drives, which is the disk space that a user can utilize. But this prior art data protection technique cannot be used on newer generation of storage media interface cards that are often used on a single hard disk, such as SATA. Therefore, the operation mode and architecture of the prior art technique need to be adjusted to meet the requirements of current hard disk technology.
Another inherent weakness in the architecture and the operation mode of the prior art technique is that the allotment of disk space to the primary data area and the virtual data area has to be equal. Since the data address of the saved in a hard disk might not be contiguous, the one-to-one copying of the entire data block though easy to implement often is a waste of the disk space. Therefore, the overall data access rate is slowed down because of the unnecessary disk action on the non-data sectors.
Since the prior art technique adopts the one-to-one copying, the system can only perform inflexible data copying and data recovery, but such system cannot support multiple node data protection and multiple selection of data reference point for archiving and data restoration.